The role of ideational distress in the relation between persecutory ideations and reactive aggression

People with schizophrenia are more likely to be violent than the people without it. Feeling driven to act on persecutory delusions may be one explanation for this, but it remains unclear why some should act on such delusions but some not. Acquisition of data from people who are very ill is problematic. Our study explores testing of hypotheses on similar ideational and behavioural associations among healthy recruits from the general population.

This study aims to test the effect of distress induced by persecutory ideas on any relationships between those ideas and aggressive behaviour, and the effect of gender.

Twenty-four men and 53 women from the general population participated in this study. The measures of aggressive behaviour were experimentally induced aggressive responding, self-reported aggressive behaviour in general, and self-reported reactive and proactive aggressive behaviours.

Among men, persecutory ideation predicted reactive aggressive responding and aggressive style of behaviour only in those who experienced higher levels of persecutory ideational distress. Among women, with generally lower levels of aggression, the role of ideational distress was more complicated; Women in the low distress group responded with higher aggression on the task. Women in the higher distress group responded with higher aggressive style. For neither men nor women were there links between persecutory ideation and proactive aggression, regardless of distress.

Ideational distress moderates the relation between persecutory ideation and aggression in different measures of aggression in men and women. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE AND/OR RESEARCH: Recognition of a relation between persecutory ideations and aggression is also important in the general population. Insight in the theory of acting upon delusions may lead to more accurate violence risk assessment. Facilitation of early detection of experienced delusional distress may lead to development of more specific psychotherapeutic interventions to manage violence risk.